Page 99 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

dangerous behavior was using the wrong floor mats, stacking floor
mats on top of each other, and/or not clipping the floor mats down.
Although it is often the case, a recall does not necessarily take
place immediately after it is announced. In this case, Toyota was
still determining the best way of dealing with improperly installed
or incorrect floor mats, and so drivers were not advised to bring
their cars into dealers immediately. Until a more permanent rem-
edy was found to limit the possibility that accelerator pedals could
be trapped if drivers ignored warnings about proper installation
of floor mats, customers were instructed, via the safety advisory,
to remove all floor mats from their vehicles, regardless of style or
manufacturer. The safety advisory also provided instructions on
how to stop a vehicle with a trapped accelerator pedal (firm pres-
sure on the brake, shift into neutral, turn the ignition off).
Toyota engineers continued to study floor mat entrapment,
and—with the floor mat recall announced—now they were get-
ting rafts of reports from dealers about customers doing danger-
ous things with floor mats. Dealer after dealer was finding vehicles
with three, four, and even up to eight floor mats stacked on top
of one another. George Tatar, general manager of a suburban
Philadelphia dealer, told us, “We were seeing everything. After-
market mats for the wrong vehicle was the least of it. We saw bath
mats. We saw leftover pieces of carpet from houses. Everything.”
That evidence contributed to the decision to handle the Sep-
tember floor mat recall by altering vehicles to increase the space
between the bottom of the accelerator and the floor of the ve-
hicle. For most vehicles, this involved cutting off a portion of
the bottom of the accelerator pedal. For a few vehicles, it also
involved removing some padding from underneath the carpet
under the accelerator pedal. While this wouldn’t entirely prevent
a pedal from being trapped if someone stacked six floor mats on

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